The term hosted exchange refers to a service in the telecommunications industry

Telecommunication

Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded...

 whereby a provider makes an e-mail box and space available on a server so its clients can host their data on the server. The provider manages the hosted data of its clients on the server. Clients can access their emails, address book, task management and documents from different places and through various media. The e-mails are routed to a laptop

Laptop

A laptop, also called a notebook, is a personal computer for mobile use. A laptop integrates most of the typical components of a desktop computer, including a display, a keyboard, a pointing device and speakers into a single unit...

 or mobile phone

Mobile phone

A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...

 through push technology

Push technology

Push technology, or server push, describes a style of Internet-based communication where the request for a given transaction is initiated by the publisher or central server...

.

System

The prerequisite for the use of this function is an exchange server. The market leader is the Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server is the server side of a client–server, collaborative application product developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Servers line of server products and is used by enterprises using Microsoft infrastructure products...

, but there are also other providers. The messaging system works regardless of network size, both in the intranet

Intranet

An intranet is a computer network that uses Internet Protocol technology to securely share any part of an organization's information or network operating system within that organization. The term is used in contrast to internet, a network between organizations, and instead refers to a network...

 and the internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 and uses MAPI

Messaging Application Programming Interface

Messaging Application Programming Interface is a messaging architecture and a Component Object Model based API for Microsoft Windows. MAPI allows client programmes to become messaging-enabled, -aware, or -based by calling MAPI subsystem routines that interface with certain messaging servers...

 (an RPC protocol

Remote procedure call

In computer science, a remote procedure call is an inter-process communication that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction...

) to enable the collaboration between groups. It can be connected both to PC

Personal computer

A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

s and Macintosh computers.

Service

Companies that have their own IT department

Information technology

Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...

can also manage their own exchange servers.